3 ms·

Rust has hype because it is mozilla, servo, and mozilla blog posts about it. But that is not the point i was making. There are a lot of languages that "have sa

by gens 9y ago

Rust has hype because it is mozilla, servo, and mozilla blog posts about it. But that is not the point i was making. There are a lot of languages that "have safety". Ada is a prime example as it "has" more "safety" and is really old. And yet nobody talked about Ada before rust came with "safety". With static analyzers and valgrind even C has enough of memory "safety". (note that Ada has more "safety" then just memory access)

tmccrmck 9y ago
With static analyzers and valgrind even C++ has a lot of memory safety. See Herb Sutter's talks.
kibwen 9y ago
> There are a lot of languages that "have safety". Yes, and in the past twenty-five years these languages have stolen away 90% of developer mindshare from C and C++. The only niches that have held against the onslaught are those that thought that language-enforced memory-safety imposed runtime costs that they couldn't afford, coupled with a complete and total obliviousness to the actual cost of memory-unsafe code--especially over public networks. By the time that the internet (née Internet) became ubiquitous, Ada's name was already mud due to its prolonged standardization process, and it certainly didn't help that there existed no freely-available production-quality implementation until the late 90s. Even if Rust weren't here, Ada just isn't positioned to capture mindshare from the modern crop of developers weaned on dynamic languages, because not only does Ada not provide memory-safe dynamic allocation without a GC (Rust does), but it also doesn't have accessible documentation (all the books that I can find cost money, unlike Rust's free book, and all the standard API documentation that I can find is in PDF format only, unlike Rust's generated HTML docs with built-in search), and it also doesn't provide a package manager (which also kills C and C++ for people who started programming with Ruby/Python/Node), and it doesn't have any of the modern niceties that people expect from languages in this decade (I can't find anything to indicate that Ada supports any kind of closures that don't have to be hacked together manually, and its support for first-class functions seems dubious). So let me amend my earlier pithy statement: Rust has hype because it's a language with modern amenities that has memory safety with no garbage collector. Nobody's disputing that Ada is safe, but Ada's lack of hype today is not because its safety is deficient, nor is it because programmer's don't care about safety. :P > With static analyzers and valgrind even C has enough of memory "safety". Citation needed. :)
- gens 9y ago
  That's why i said that the hype behind rust is unreasonable. Just look at your post. Is it an objective look at programming ? Or just a lot of words that make rust look like the greatest thing ever ? If you think it is objective, what you wrote that is, then why did you not spend 10min looking at Ada ? Why did you even mention GC, the tired argument as to why "rust is better then Go (note: go has a thing that is more awsome then anything in rust, not that you would care; also go can be used without gc) ? Not that it matters anyway. There is more to programming languages then "features". There is no "perfect" programming language. Rust is most definitely not a replacement for C. And it sucks at "systems programming", whatever that is (for kernel programming, C is definitely a lot better). Just the mere fact that i will not talk about the shortcomings of rust is a clear indication that there is too much hype behind it (you can blame it on the "loud minority", but there is none). Feel free to write yet another page of text about how rust is the most greatest thing that is great and i am wrong.
  - kibwen 9y ago
    By all means, please continue to ramble incoherently (who said anything about Go??) while arguing from emotion and failing to refute any of my points. :)

by gens 9y ago

tmccrmck 9y ago

With static analyzers and valgrind even C++ has a lot of memory safety. See Herb Sutter's talks.

kibwen 9y ago

> There are a lot of languages that "have safety". Yes, and in the past twenty-five years these languages have stolen away 90% of developer mindshare from C and C++. The only niches that have held against the onslaught are those that thought that language-enforced memory-safety imposed runtime costs that they couldn't afford, coupled with a complete and total obliviousness to the actual cost of memory-unsafe code--especially over public networks. By the time that the internet (née Internet) became ubiquitous, Ada's name was already mud due to its prolonged standardization process, and it certainly didn't help that there existed no freely-available production-quality implementation until the late 90s. Even if Rust weren't here, Ada just isn't positioned to capture mindshare from the modern crop of developers weaned on dynamic languages, because not only does Ada not provide memory-safe dynamic allocation without a GC (Rust does), but it also doesn't have accessible documentation (all the books that I can find cost money, unlike Rust's free book, and all the standard API documentation that I can find is in PDF format only, unlike Rust's generated HTML docs with built-in search), and it also doesn't provide a package manager (which also kills C and C++ for people who started programming with Ruby/Python/Node), and it doesn't have any of the modern niceties that people expect from languages in this decade (I can't find anything to indicate that Ada supports any kind of closures that don't have to be hacked together manually, and its support for first-class functions seems dubious). So let me amend my earlier pithy statement: Rust has hype because it's a language with modern amenities that has memory safety with no garbage collector. Nobody's disputing that Ada is safe, but Ada's lack of hype today is not because its safety is deficient, nor is it because programmer's don't care about safety. :P > With static analyzers and valgrind even C has enough of memory "safety". Citation needed. :)

gens 9y ago
That's why i said that the hype behind rust is unreasonable. Just look at your post. Is it an objective look at programming ? Or just a lot of words that make rust look like the greatest thing ever ? If you think it is objective, what you wrote that is, then why did you not spend 10min looking at Ada ? Why did you even mention GC, the tired argument as to why "rust is better then Go (note: go has a thing that is more awsome then anything in rust, not that you would care; also go can be used without gc) ? Not that it matters anyway. There is more to programming languages then "features". There is no "perfect" programming language. Rust is most definitely not a replacement for C. And it sucks at "systems programming", whatever that is (for kernel programming, C is definitely a lot better). Just the mere fact that i will not talk about the shortcomings of rust is a clear indication that there is too much hype behind it (you can blame it on the "loud minority", but there is none). Feel free to write yet another page of text about how rust is the most greatest thing that is great and i am wrong.
- kibwen 9y ago
  By all means, please continue to ramble incoherently (who said anything about Go??) while arguing from emotion and failing to refute any of my points. :)